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Ricardo Hausmann, a former minister of planning of Venezuela and former Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, is Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University and a professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The current U.S. administration is not opposed to the immigration of skilled workers into the U.S. They are opposed to the immigration of high school graduates and less into a country with a per capita GDP of $57,000. Domestic high school graduates represent a net life time cost to the government after considering tax revenues of $400,000. It is economic suicide to allow this to continue. You don't see low wage immigration in Asia and there is a reason.

The only reason that politicians have embraced this national suicide is to buy votes for their political theology.

The Democratic party has moved so far to the left (identity politics and racial quotas) and right (corporate trade deals, Wall Street bailouts, neoliberalism, etc.) that it can't get conventional Americans to vote for it. Hence, the need for imported poor people who will vote for the Democrats. The Democrats have abandoned the middle-class and now want/need an underclass to keep them in office.

PK, It is quite true that you probably can't download the source code for gadgets made in China. So what? How many people in the world care? China's system is somewhat "closed" in that respect. Has it hurt China to any significant degree? No, is the obvious answer.

Peter, sorry for the late response but I don't come the PS site too often these days, as I tend to look for tech/biotech articles but PS now seems obsessed with Trump, or dismal science practitioners making specious speculations.

Let me try and illustrate the point I was making about closed-box systems where you don't have visibility of the software. People don't understand the size of the personal security hole created. The description is tedious but bear with me, there is a point.

I recently acquired a Chromecast clone type dongle to allow me to project my laptop or mobile screen onto the television. It works by priming the dongle to connect to your home wireless, and then plugging the dongle into the TV's HDMI. On my laptop, I connect to the hotspot wifi the dongle generates instead of my home wireless. This bridges me back to my home wifi but also allows my laptop to show it's screen on the TV.

The point is: suppose I access my bank account while connected via the dongle. If this software can snap my screen, how do I know it's not sending back a few dozen encrypted jpegs of my screen every time I access known bank urls?

I think this problem will be solved by an increasing requirement to make the software Open Source, and packaged software will come about that can verify the source as safe, build it locally, and injected it back into the firmware of the device you have purchased. A well packaged, supercharged version of Docker could do it. Without something like this, a major global hack that sits dormant for months, and then strikes globally, robbing billions is an ever increasing likelihood.

In 1492, Spain expelled the (last of) the Moors and Jews. Many (but not all) of the Jews went to the Netherlands. The Moors went to North Africa. Over the next 100 years, the Netherlands became a global power. North Africa did not. Perhaps there is more to success than what countries expel minorities and what country accepts them. People matter. That's the ultimate heresy, but still true.

In 1492, Cristopher Columbus discovered America, Jews were expelled, and the Kingdom of Granada failed (Islam was still legal for a while and Morisco where expelled only in XVII century). The Spanish Empire didn't fail because of expulsions rather it was possible to build it because of them.

AS, Of course you are correct. The idea that Spain failed because of "intolerance" is a manifestation of contemporary cosmopolitan political ideology, not what actually happened in Europe 500 years ago. I attribute much of Northern Europe's rise and Spain's fall to geography. Northern Europe has much more rainfall and coal than the South. Before 1500, rain and coal were not major advantages. After 1500, they were.

Lee Kuan Yew: “Absolutely … But, mind you, immigration of the highly intelligent and highly hard-working, very hard-working people. If you get immigration from the fruit-pickers [chuckles for several seconds at the idea], you may not get very far!”

Indeed, when it comes to me, as a grandfather, I would do anything I could to guarantee that my grandchildren will live surrounded by 1st class robots, not 2nd class, and by the smartest (and wisest) artificial intelligence, not by any runner up :-)

Except for the blindingly obvious fact that 3D printing will obviate the need to connect to manufacturers across national boundaries. Why would you need to connect to the manufacturer of a million different airplane parts across a hundred different countries, when 3D printing allows all of them all to be created at home? The only thing needed is the raw materials, and even that is not a given, considering that tech will allow biosynthetic substitutes to be created for most metals. All you will ultimately need is hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. Literally *everything* needed can be made from that.

It's irrational to posit things manufactured by 3D printings are perfect and the innovations can only be made by you rather than coming from others. The logic is things can always be better, isolation is wrong.

In that case, why is there sucn a very poor OpenSource culture and hardly any OpenSource contribution from China when it comes to software?

A trivial example: if I buy some electronic gadget manufactured by a Chinese company on Amazon (or AliExpress) the chances that I can download the source code of the firmware are way lower compared with a US or even Japanese company. A lot of Microsoft code is now OpenSource (as it is from tons of other western companies). Which Chinese tech companies have made their software tech OpenSource then?

So western created open tech is there to be plundered, but not added to, right?

Isolation is wrong, it seems, as long as it's others doing the isolating.

What you mentioned is irrelevant to the topic. Maybe you can list some accurate data, such as contributors to GitHub in x year. Meanwhile, the Great Firewall of China also stopped Chinese from making contributions to open source.

By the way, please take this case into consideration: If someone from place A did something wrong in place B, can we posit that anyone from place A will make the similar mistakes in place B?

Ok, fair point (the last one), so a rewind and a more nuanced response.

The truth is, we all come with layers of "baggage" (national attachments, generational attitudes, race, religion, class, all random chance we happen to be born into), attitudes which a few moments of rational thought can demolish intellectually - but in reality most of us find difficult to get past in practical life, not least me.

I'm a big fan of ending isolation but a biological knee-jerk of self-interests kicks-in, all at different levels.

One level which says: that bunch over there are rising fast in both prosperity and numbers because they work hard and have been led rather well over the last few decades, and I percieve a direct correlation between them getting richer and me getting poorer. So there is resentment, as in: "...I don't understand their language or civilization, and what's more they have only gotten this far by stealing from us.." type of thing - not helped by the fact that there are odd grains of truth in such populists myths. For example, I used to work for a Unix manufacturer in the mid 1990s (now defunct since the rise of Open Source Linux), and the CEO once told me: the biggest wordlwide base of the software was in China, but that generated no money, because it was all cloned/cracked copies.

A second level is one which observes, we in the rich west have liberalised to the extent that many of our left no longer believe in nation states, but hang on just a dang second: the bastion of the left in the east, China, is now more nationalistic than ever. For example, it is difficult to imagine that China would tolerate boat-loads of migrants turning up in their ports daily to seek a better life, not least because thay have big enough problems to deal with looking after their own people. What is not difficult to imagine is that the response, which (call me a cynic) would be swift, silent, out of the global public eye and brutal.

Yet another level of fear is more intellectual, generated in anyone with any knowledge of the terror under Mao Zedong, and the attitude can arise: if that system of government can generate such misery, then the least we in the west can do is cast a wary eye over them as their power grows.

Isolation is wrong, sure. So now tell me: is it sometimes understandable?